Year Walk

Genre: Adventure, Point and click

Developer: Simogo

Released: 6. March 2014

In the old days man tried to catch a glimpse of the future in the strangest of ways. Enter the world of the horrifying Swedish folklore world in this great indie game.

Pc game releases March 9 - March 16

Titanfall on 11th, indie games on Mars, escape from Alcatraz and many more...

Elder Scrolls Online Beta Weekend

Genre: MMORPG

Developer: ZeniMax Online Studios

Release Date:  April 4, 2014

I had the opportunity to try out the Elder Scrolls Online Beta this weekend. It was amazing, I was always a fan of Elder Scrolls games since I first played Morrowind, and although I am not a huge fan of MMO, this will be a great game.

The Yawhg

 

Genre: RPG, Adventure

Developer: Damian Sommer, Emily Carroll

The good:

- beautiful artwork and soundtrack

- replayable

- many varieties in the adventures and outcomes

 

The bad:

- short

 

The mysterious Yawhg is coming. Your chosen heroes have 6 weeks to prepare for the arrival. Can you save the town?

This is a one-to-four player game. There are several locations in the city, where your heroes can do activities, like chopping wood in the forest, or tending the sick in the hospital.While doing these activities, they gain skill points, magic for meditating, persistency for fighting in the arena, etc. Plus every time you make an activity, a special scenario appears, and if you choose well your character gains additional points, or if you make the wrong decision you lose points. All your decisions are influencing the final outcome, the fate of your characters and the town. Although don't expect a 100% happy ending even if you think you did everything right.

It is a fairly short game, but can be replayed many times. One playthrough is around 10 minutes, even if you read everything carefully. The scenarios that come up are varied, and even if the same one comes up multiple times, the outcome depends on your already gathered skill points. When I finished first, I wanted more and more. I replayed many times, tried many variants of the activities, and every time I was surprised and excited about the ending. It can be played as a single player, or multiplayer. Both types can give a great experience, but with more people the game is more convincing, and you can imagine you are really there waiting in tension for the unknown.

The game is like a beautiful drawing, and you get involved in the fantastical town's life, choose leader for talking rats, become a werewolf, or if you are lucky dance through the night with a druid. Emily Carroll did a great job with the artwork. The soundtrack is gorgeous, after I stopped playing I couldn't stop listening to Halina Heron's song.

 
All together, the music, the illustrations give a special, fantastical mood, which just draws in the player into this magical world.

Final Score:

9/10

Thief

Genre: Stealth

Developer: Eidos Studios 

Finally I got to play this game. I've been waiting since I finished Thief: Deadly Shadows in 2004. For me the Thief series are the top in stealth games, so I kind of have a soft spot for this game.

The good:

- the stealth system

- the environment, and the mood

- Focus Points, new skills and items

- can save whenever I want

The bad:

- loading screen between city parts

 

Our hero, well we can't exactly speak of a hero, he is a thief,  but he has his moral code, Garrett. He returns to the City after a while, and soon gets a new mission. Meets Errin, complications arise, and he finds out that he was passed out a whole year after the incident. He gets a new mission, and troughout the game starts to put together what happened to him. I liked the characters, Garrett brings his shadows, and I just adored his messenger crow. Spy in brothels, crawl through underground caves, it has a huge variety in levels.

The game is made out of chapters, and inbetween them the player can take on side missions, go exploring the city, collect loot, and buy new equipment. I like this structure, it's not too frustrating, the only thing I didn't like is that the city is split into regions, and it loads them separately. I was happy to see that I can save whenever I want, and there is no autosave function, like in most games nowadays, I like to have control when I want to save my game. You can choose your playstyle, whether you want to stealth trough, or bump every enemiy in the head, the game counts the choices you made and after every chapter gives you a statistic about it.

The player can choose from multiple paths, maybe slide under the city to get to the next goal, or use shadows to knock out the guards. All in all the accent is on the stealthy gameplay, with not many variants for melee combat, and that's another huge plus for me. I have played enough other games where I have to kill hundreds of enemies just to get to the next goal and that gets boring quickly.  There are many other elements that are much more interesting than just shooting or fighting, like distracting enemies, swooping through lit areas into the shadows, new tools and arrows, and there are the Focus Points. Focus Points are used to get special abilites, like seeing where the loots are in a room.

The game's middle difficulty is just perfect, but if somebody wants a big challange he can have it. The game can be played quickly, or take your time, explore everything, collect every document and loot, make all the challanges, etc. The levels are well designed, you can't go lost in a house, but you have enough side rooms and streets to not get bored by a too linear gameplay.

In the graphics I can see the old Thief games style, and that's great. Many games can't bring back their prequels's mood or style, but Eidos did a great job. Plus there are all the little details on the streets, in every room, like flyers on street walls, and little glass shards on floor.

This is a great game, worthy of the title, once you begin to play it you can never get bored of it. It can be replayed, depending on how you want to play it, maybe for collecting everything and completing every challange.

Final Score:

10/10